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Great piece from Mountainfilm Festival Director David Holbrooke on the evolution of Mountainfilm and the sacrifices we make to live a sensible life.
Last January, I traveled to Salt Lake City for both the Sundance Film Festival and the Outdoor Retailer Trade Show (OR) (which brings together companies that make gear and clothes for skiers, climbers and other outdoor enthusiasts). The events overlapped, so it was a chance to connect with two distinct groups: outdoor people and film folk.
In my world, these two groups are very much related as I program a film and ideas festival in Telluride, Colorado, called Mountainfilm. It takes place every Memorial Day weekend (May 28-31 2010). The festival started in 1979 as a gathering of mountaineers who wanted to climb during the day and watch mountaineering movies night. It has since evolved into a vibrant intersection of artists and activists, filmmakers and philosophers, go-getters and game changers. This year, we’re bringing to Telluride a diverse group of people, such as Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea; New Yorker writer George Packer; mountaineer Ed Viesturs; and the actress and playwright Anna Deveare Smith.
Another one of our guests will be Tim DeChristopher, a young man who I consider to be the Rosa Parks of the climate movement. In December 2008, the Bush Administration was hastily auctioning off oil and natural gas leases on 150,000 acres of land right near Arches National Park in Utah. DeChristopher went to protest, but he wanted to do something more than stand outside the BLM building and shout into the wind. He ended up walking into the building and was asked if he was there to bid. Surprised, he said yes and was handed paddle number 70, which he used for what is arguably, the most significant and effective act of civil disobedience in the history of the climate movement. DeChistopher, a 27-year-old economics major at the time, snapped up 22,000 acres of land for $1.7 million, a tab he had no intention or capability of paying. Soon after, the auction was declared null and void, and the land was saved, but DeChristopher is facing a federal trial in Salt Lake City this summer that could send him to prison for ten years.
DeChristopher was one of the few people I saw both at Sundance and OR. He was at the film festival to take in movies about the environment, which included the important film Gasland, which we will also play at Mountainfilm this year. Additionally, he went to a showing of Freedom Riders (which Mountainfilm will also screen) about civil rights activists who bravely challenged Jim Crow laws throughout the Deep South. He’d gone to the film because he wanted to see what the climate movement could learn from the civil rights movement. What struck him was how the Freedom Riders were so willing to sacrifice their own personal safety and well-being in comparison to our current refusal–even among ardent environmentalists–to make real sacrifices that could stave off the imminent apocalypse of climate change.
DeChristopher was at OR to talk about his latest climate action, which revolves around Dick Bass, an amateur alpinist who was the first man to climb the Seven Summits (the highest peaks on each continent) and the owner of the famed Snowbird ski resort outside of Salt Lake City. Bass–a hugely successful businessman–is also the lead investor in a massive coalmine in Alaska, called the Chuitna Coal Project that had inspired DeChristopher and his group, Peaceful Uprising, to start a boycott called “Don’t Ski Coalbird.”
Frankly, this boycott was a tough sell at OR because many of the people there–including myself–love to ski, and Snowbird is a particularly renowned mountain. DeChristopher spoke to one famed mountaineer at O.R. who has been to the Himalayas dozens of times and has personally seen the recession of the glaciers. This talented and charismatic alpinist also knows Bass, yet he awkwardly dismissed attempting to influence him by mumbling banalities about how everyone has to work within their own comfort zone.
As it happened, OR coincided with a major winter storm, so a lot of folks at the tradeshow made plans to ski (to hell with business, it’s a powder day!). Of course, the place to be, according to all of the well-meaning locals, was Snowbird.
I thought I was down with sacrifice, having given up tuna (because of its imminent extinction), shrimp (because of the environmental impact) and Jamba Juice (because of styrofoam cups). I miss these treats, but giving up a powder day–and perhaps an epic one–at Snowbird was a different sort of sacrifice that cut to my core.
Of course, as I wrestled with this moral dilemma, I knew that my sacrifices were small potatoes and largely irrelevant to the bigger issues we face as a planet. I also knew that forgoing a powder day was laughable compared to what DeChristopher was giving up: his liberty.
Nevertheless, it deepened my realization of how bloody hard it is to live a sensible way of life. Thanks to the films and people that come through Mountainfilm (last year, writer Bill McKibben spoke about his important work at 350.org; this year, artist Maya Lin will talk about her essential project about extinction titled “What is Missing?”) I am well aware of the nightmares that await us if we don’t change our ways and make sacrifices that will hurt.
So I started by honoring Tim DeChristopher’s boycott of Snowbird. My buddy and I skied Solitude, which doesn’t have the vertical of Snowbird but is still pretty great. I know–it wasn’t such of a sacrifice, but if we don’t all start making real and sustained changes in the way we live, powder days on any mountain are going to be a thing of the past.
Each Memorial Day weekend, artists and activists, filmmakers and photographers come to Telluride for Mountainfilm. At our core, we are about exploring, preserving and sustaining environments, cultures and conversations, so this unique gathering is part film festival and part ideas festival with leading edge thinkers – and doers – getting together to change the world.
Leading up to this year’s festival we wanted to focus on conversations worth sustaining and we’ve asked some of Mountainfilm’s special guests to help us out. Throughout the coming weeks we’ll be posting our conversations with them. We hope that they engage and inspire you.
If you want to participate in this discussion, just submit your questions via our Facebook page or our Twitter account.
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One of the world’s most accomplished mountaineers and explorers, an author, filmmaker and photographer, Rick Ridgeway is known for being on the first team of Americans to summit K2 and the first from any country to do it without supplemental oxygen. He was on the second American team to climb Everest. But in recent years, he has taken on his most daunting challenge — saving our Earth’s wildness.
A conservationist to the core, Ridgeway has become an indispensable ally of Earth’s most iconic endangered species and wild places. He has trekked from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro to the Indian Ocean amongst lions and elephants, to raise awareness to how humans have transformed our wild world, and hauled a 300-pound rickshaw across the 16,000-foot rugged Tibetan wilderness to protect the chiru, a Tibetan antelope being killed off by poachers. Ridgeway
In the last several years, Ridgeway has brought this battle home to America’s last remaining wild places and the iconic animals in danger of disappearing. Part of the Patagonia family since the beginning, Ridgeway partnered with the clothing company to launch the Freedom to Roam campaign, an initiative based on the idea that wild animals need hundreds of miles of interconnected, undisturbed wild habitat to survive. In the United States, where sprawl and concrete has gobbled wilderness at a terrifying pace, this attempt to protect migratory corridors for North America’s grizzlies, caribou and wild salmon is an awesome feat.
The epic journeys of these incredible animals are reminiscent of Ridgeway’s own adventures. And in the face of a challenge this huge, it takes a bold, passionate and determined leader to succeed — a leader exactly like Rick Ridgeway.
What factors first fueled your thirst for adventure?
I grew up in the orange groves Southern California in the 50’s and 60’s, and when I saw the place paved over with housing developments, I fled to the mountains above the LA basin. I used to ditch school and go up there on my Honda 50 motor scooter and hike around: it was where I found solace. Then I started going up there in the winter, and pretty soon had to buy myself an ice ax and boots and crampons and a copy of Freedom of the Hills, with its instruction section on how to use the tools. So I taught myself: I couldn’t find anyone else with my interest or passion for the mountains and mountaineering— that didn’t happen until I was out of high school.
Famed Catamaran is sinking in the Southern Ocean
Ady Gil
Six crewmembers Rescued by the Sea Shepherd Ship Bob Barker
In an unprovoked attack captured on film, the Japanese security ship Shonan Maru No. 2 deliberately rammed and caused catastrophic damage to the Sea Shepherd catamaran Ady Gil.
Six crew crewmembers, four from New Zealand, one from Australia, and one from the Netherlands were immediately rescued by the crew of the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker. None of the crew Ady Gil crew were injured.
The Ady Gil is believed to be sinking and chances of salvage are very grim. Read More…
A link to this trailer was in my inbox today (thanks, Jenny). The film is called The Shark Con Film, and the main point seems to be that sharks are doing just fine, thanks, and that anyone who says otherwise is just trying to make money.
We’ve played our fair share of shark films with a different message, including Sharkwater (MF07) and Mind of the Demon (MF06).
There is an authentic controversy over the exact number of sharks killed by humans every year, but as other bloggers have noted, the trailer for The Shark Con Film is lacking on credentials and scientific evidence.
After a little detective work, I found that the production company credited with the film, Tiburon Productions LLC, is also associated with the film Summer of the Sharks and Shark Diver Magazine (SDM). Summer of Sharks is billed as an adrenaline film, and the trailer didn’t seem biased one way or the other (environmentalist or anti-). However, the editor has published that their goal is “To do our part to help sharks survive for generations to come, and to take our sport to the next level.” (Link here)
Although it’s possible that it the film will be made, I think the trailer is mostly likely a publicity stunt. What do you think?
Anna Brones is working with Mountainfilm as our new social-media guru and she has the opportunity to be a Huffington Post Ambassador in Copenhagen as a citizen journalist. We want to help her get there. Please watch her entry video and vote for Anna to be our representative. We know you will be as impressed with her as we are.
A couple of years back I went to see a film called Darwin’s Nightmare by Hubert Saupert, a truly disturbing doc about the largest lake in Africa, Lake Victoria. It has shores that touch Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda and to no one’s surprise, it is struggling.
Nile Perch
This heartbreaking film is about how in the 1960s, the Nile Perch was introduced to the lake as an experiment. Of course, much went awry as the Perch was an able breeder and a vicious predator that wiped out much of the lake’s indigenous fish. The upside was the fish is a big seller in Europe so the local economy got a little boost from the fish industry but that was short-lived and unsustainable. The downside was that the lake’s natural balance was thrown off by the emergence of the perch and it is now slowly dying.
Most films about forlorn and forgotten places in the world have some earnest and dedicated character in the film who is trying to do whatever they can to prevent an overwhelming disaster. Not in this film and it was devastating. I very much remember coming out of the theater in a bit of a daze so I walked around Greenwich Village for a while, then got in a cab to go home to Brooklyn. I had the window open as we drove over the Brookyn Bridge and crossed over the Fulton Fish Market – something I had done countless times - but this time, there was the powerful and unmistakable smell of fish, which nauseated me after seeing that film.
Monday’s NY Times has an update on Lake Victoria and of course, it is not a pretty picture. – David Holbrooke
Lake Victoria
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